Thursday, September 1, 2016

"I have been agnostic about this kind of movie recently,
after the overwrought disappointments of Christopher
Nolan’s Interstellar and Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special.
But Villeneuve’s Arrival is both heartfelt and very entertaining."

Sunday, July 6, 2014

“These two redefine the laws not just of chemistry but also of physics, with each coming across as both immovable object and irresistible force…. I was always aware of how ineffably, achingly attracted each was to the other, and of the diametrically opposed ways in which that attraction became flesh….

… His Tom is all flying edges and angles, a perpetually moving and hungry soul who never pauses in the pursuit of his appetites….

… this Kyra is a formidably centered presence, the still counterpoint to Tom’s charming, full-court-press animation….

… The friction and the possibilities of fusion between Kyra and Tom— who must be together and cannot be together— make ‘Skylight’ one of the most intelligently sentimental love stories of our time.”

“The friction and the possibilities of fusion” —

“Rubbin’ sticks and stones together
makes the sparks ignite…Skyrockets in flight!”

Saturday, April 8, 2017

"I guess I found my future through Billy Name’s eye.
I saw his pictures of the Warhol Factory when I was
in college and thought, 'Oh that’s the place to get to.
Everyone is so beautiful and it looks brilliant and
complicated – art, music, film, but most of all a kind
of wild life.' It looked like the future as I imagined it."

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

… The World as Myth is a subtle concept. It has sometimes been called multiperson solipsism, despite the internal illogic of that phrase. Yet illogic may be necessary, as the concept denies logic. For many centuries religion held sway as the explanation of the universe- or multiverse. The details of revealed religions differed wildly but were essentially the same: Somewhere up in the sky-or down in the earth-or in a volcano-any inaccessible place- there was an old man in a nightshirt who knew everything and was all powerful and created everything and rewarded and punished… and could be bribed.

"Sometimes this Almighty was female but not often because human males are usually bigger, stronger, and more belligerent; God was created in Pop's image.

"The Almighty-God idea came under attack because it explained nothing; it simply pushed all explanations one stage farther away. In the nineteenth century atheistic positivism started displacing the Almighty-God notion in that minority of the population that bathed regularly.

"Atheism had a limited run, as it, too, explains nothing, being merely Godism turned upside down. Logical positivism was based on the physical science of the nineteenth century which, physicists of that century honestly believed, fully explained the universe as a piece of clockwork.

"The physicists of the twentieth century made short work of that idea. Quantum mechanics and Schrodringer's cat tossed out the clockwork world of 1890 and replaced it with a fog of probability in which anything could happen. Of course the intellectual class did not notice this for many decades, as an intellectual is a highly educated man who can't do arithmetic with his shoes on, and is proud of his lack. Nevertheless, with the death of positivism, Godism and Creationism came back stronger than ever.

"In the late twentieth century -correct me when I' m wrong, Hilda-Hilda and her family were driven off Earth by a devil, one they dubbed 'the Beast.' They fled in a vehicle you have met, Gay Deceiver, and in their search for safety they visited many dimensions, many universes… and Hilda made the greatest philosophical discovery of all time."

"I'll bet you say that to all the girls!"

"Quiet, dear. They visited, among more mundane places, the Land of Oz-"

I sat up with a jerk. Not too much sleep last night and Dr. Harshaw's lecture was sleep-inducing. "Did you say 'Oz'?"

"I tell you three times. Oz, Oz, Oz. They did indeed visit the fairyland dreamed up by L. Frank Baum. And the Wonderland invented by the Reverend Mr. Dodgson to please Alice. And other places known only to fiction. Hilda discovered what none of us had noticed before because we were inside it: The World is Myth. We create it ourselves-and we change it ourselves. A truly strong myth maker, such as Homer, such as Baum, such as the creator of Tarzan, creates substantial and lasting worlds … whereas the fiddlin', unimaginative liars and fabulists shape nothing new and their tedious dreams are forgotten. ….

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Yesterday's evening numbers in the New York Lottery
were 007 and 3856. You are free to supply your own
interpretation of the former. The latter may, if you like,
be interpreted as post 3856, The Illuminati Stone.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

The Last Airbender is about an avatar who is master of the four elements
air, water, earth, and fire. For a more sophisticated approach to gnosticism
and the four elements, see Irenaeus: Against Heresies.

Monday, December 19, 2011

"A Nexus is a place equidistant from the five elements as explained in the TV series Charmed . Using this as a point of reference, it is quite possible that there could be several Nexus points of power scattered throughout the world, though rare."

Sunday, November 13, 2011

"…in the original versions of a Times report by Jeremy W. Peters, [the new executive editor, Jill Abramson] flatly declared: 'In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion.'" —The Daily Beast

The Times this afternoon—

See also a follow-up from last June
to this morning's "lost in space" quote—

“To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns. Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications. Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things. These explorations led to… [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story ).”

Sunday, April 18, 2010

"Because CII men worked in foreign countries without invitation, and often to the detriment of the established governments, they had no recourse to official protection. Organization men to the core, the CII heads decided that another Division must be established to combat the problem. They relied on their computers to find the ideal man to head the new arm, and the card that survived the final sorting bore the name Yurasis Dragon. In order to bring Mr. Dragon to the United States, it was necessary to absolve him of accusations lodged at the War Crimes Tribunal concerning certain genocidal peccadillos, but CII considered him worth the effort."

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The previous entry dealt, in part, with a dead Jesuit whose obituary appears in today's Los Angeles Times. The online obituaries page places the Jesuit, without a photo, beneath a picture of a dead sitcom writer and to the left of a picture of a dead guru.

"Walter John Burghardt was born July 10, 1914, in New York, the son of immigrants from what is now Poland. He entered a Jesuit seminary in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., at 16, and in 1937 received a master's degree from Woodstock College in Maryland. He was ordained in 1941." He died, by the way, on Saturday, Feb. 16, 2008.

"In order to show that Aristotelian logicians were at least vaguely aware of a kind of analogy or possible isomorphism between logical relations and mathematical relations, Father Clark seizes at one place (p. 8) upon the fact that Aristotle uses the word, 'figure' (schema), in describing the syllogism and concludes from this that 'it is obvious that the schema of the syllogism is to serve the logician precisely as the figure serves the geometer.' On the face of it, this strikes one as a bit far fetched…."

Thursday, December 27, 2007

II Chronicles 1: 7: In that night did God appear unto Solomon, and said unto him, Ask what I shall give thee.8: And Solomon said unto God, Thou hast shewed great mercy unto David my father, and hast made me to reign in his stead.9: Now, O LORD God, let thy promise unto David my father be established: for thou hast made me king over a people like the dust of the earth in multitude.10: Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?

“At 42– a professor with no museum experience– he was named curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. It was, and is, the most influential job in the fluid, insular, fiercely contentious world of modern art. Just two decades past his last Amherst game, the lineman from Savannah was sitting in the chair where the most critical decisions in his profession are made– ‘the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity,’ according to his Olympian predecessor Alfred Barr. The Modern and its chief curator serve the American art establishment as a kind of aesthetic Supreme Court, and most of their rulings are beyond appeal.”

"Desperate Housewives"… ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for ages 12-17. ("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain in part why its current advertisers include products like Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks."

Those who cherish the First Amendment can only hope that the Traditional Values Coalition, OneMillionMoms.com, OneMillionDads.com and all the rest send every e-mail they can to the F.C.C. demanding punitive action against the stations that broadcast "Desperate Housewives." A "moral values" crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where entertainment is god.

— "The Great Indecency Hoax," a New York Times column by Frank Rich quoted in Log24 on Nov. 26, 2004

The entertainment continues. A rabbi's obituary in today's New York Times (see previous entry) served as ad-bait for "Joshua," a Fox Searchlight film opening July 6.

A search for a less sacrilegious memorial to the rabbi yields the following:

For a perhaps preferable
reference to bait, in the
context of St. Peter as
a "fisher of men," seethe Christian "mandorla"
or "vesica piscis,"
a figure hidden within
the geometry of Rome's
St. Peter's Square–
which, despite its name,
is an oval:

“Meanwhile, [Mexico] continued to deal with the savagery of Tuesday night’s televised lynchings, with some saying the media had exploited the occurrence.

‘This is a new and worrisome phenomenon,’ security analyst José Reveles said in an interview… ‘It’s like the evil offspring of all the violent exploitation in the media.’ ‘It was Fuenteovejuna,’ he said, referring to the work by the Spanish golden age playwright Lope de Vega in which an entire town covers up the slaying of a corrupt official.”